OpenStreetMap
I would like to start by explaining that this is an exercise in imagination on how we could improve the UX/UI in the OSM profile, this means that some changes were based on my experience and there are still some things missing that I have not explored, like the Diaries, settings and Messages, I would love to get feedbacks from you!!!
More social and personal
OpenStreetMap is a platform that encompasses not only the map but also its mappers and their communities. To start, I chose to give an air of greater personalization to the profile, bringing a larger picture of the user and a cover giving more room for customization, so they can show more of their passions beyond the map. Bringing a more familiar experience as in other social networks I gave a greater emphasis to the follow button and replacing the “add as friend” function that nowadays is kind of in disuse not to say “cringe”, A good function would be to be able to choose and manage who can follow you and from that who can send you messages too, giving more control to the user of who can follow and send messages can reduce the number of spam. Another point would be to show which organizations the person participates so it would be easier for other mappers to identify paid mappers, for example.
More statistics please!
One of the things missing in OSM profile is statistics. This is useful to know better who is the profile owner but also for future employers.
Gamefication
How to motivate the mappers more? given goals to be achieved! One of the things that most motivated me to continue mapping was to complete all the Missing Maps Bagdes. I am not only talking about a baghdad system and goals, but also a scoring system based on what is edited or added. Another point would be bagdes for participation in mapathons promoted by local and international communities demonstrating that the mapper is an active person in the community.
Profile of Organizations and Teams
The same way Github has specific pages for organizations OSM should also have, this would make it easier to know who are the organizations that work on OSM, who participates and where they participate, the intention is to better centralize the information. Today if we see that each OSM application has a different way to divide their teams and track their performance what I propose is that teams are created directly on OSM and made available via API for other applications
Discussion
Comment from philippec on 22 October 2021 at 18:06
How many contributors have the good manners to say something about themselves ?
Comment from PlayzinhoAgro on 22 October 2021 at 18:19
Hi @philippec, these contributors can leave blank
Comment from Christian Ledermann on 23 October 2021 at 11:12
Thanks, that looks great!
Comment from Enora Lecuyer on 28 October 2021 at 20:50
That looks amazing! So much clearer and dynamic! I would love to see gamification incorporated into OSM! That would bring so many new mappers and help with retention! Brilliant idea!
Comment from PlayzinhoAgro on 29 October 2021 at 13:15
thanks @Chistian Ledermann
Comment from PlayzinhoAgro on 29 October 2021 at 13:16
thanks @jellythecube Yes it would help a lot in retention, few new users know Missing Maps, I think bringing it into the OSM profile would make it more accessible
Comment from Christian Ledermann on 29 October 2021 at 14:54
There are also the quarterly projects by many OSM user groups. Not sure how this could be highlighted, but it could be an interesting addition.
Comment from MatthiasMatthias on 30 October 2021 at 09:34
Awesome, I like it a lot.
Comment from Nearby0051 on 30 October 2021 at 11:45
Would love to see that implemented
Comment from Pieter Vander Vennet on 30 October 2021 at 20:46
This looks awesome!
I’m a bit wary of too much social media feel and too much gamification. We should avoid to have people add junk edits just too see the statistics go up! (E.g. someone asking how much edits they need for the free osmand live, or pokemon-go parks). Some of them convert into real and decent mappers though, so it truly is the excercise of finding the right balance.
Having people feel valued for their (actual) work however would be great!
Google Maps does a great job with this by indicating that ‘XXX people saw the image you added and YYY people saw the opening hours you added to a shop! Great job!”
Ofc, gathering this kind of stats is hard in a decentralized, privacy-sensitive community…
Comment from gendy54 on 31 October 2021 at 16:00
It is a very good idea to switch Pascal Neis’ stats to the user profile. Regarding paid mapper, I always wondered how easily one could declare oneself. For the moment, not too many simple solutions.
Comment from Leo1590 on 31 October 2021 at 17:46
Wow, I really like the idea. The design is 10/10
Comment from PlayzinhoAgro on 1 November 2021 at 12:56
@Christian Lederman I think they could make bagdes available for those who participated in the challenges
Comment from PlayzinhoAgro on 1 November 2021 at 12:57
@MatthiasMatthias Thanks!
Comment from PlayzinhoAgro on 1 November 2021 at 12:58
@JannikK Me too
Comment from PlayzinhoAgro on 1 November 2021 at 13:07
@Pieter Vander Vennet I also believe that gamification can have its downsides, that’s why I didn’t cover it that much, but I think that if it was implemented it would have to have a good discussion in the community. About privacy the user could choose if his profile is public or not (only followers) and also approve who follows him. I think OpenStreetMap lacks a vision of UX to value its mappers and attract new mappers, of course Big G has more power to do this, but I think that as a decentralized community we could through events value our mappers.
Comment from Pieter Vander Vennet on 1 November 2021 at 17:09
@PlayzinhoAgro: another question: who is gonna implement this? Or is this just a wild idea. There are very little devs who know the Rails Port enough to do meaningfull work on it, let alone who have time to do it!
You’re also welcome to have a look at MapComplete.osm.be, which I’m the dev of and could use some UX-feedback on
Comment from PlayzinhoAgro on 1 November 2021 at 17:50
@Pieter Vander Vennet It’s more of a wild idea, I have a few questions about mapcomplete, before I can get started:
What would be the main goal of MapComplete?
What do you expect from the future of MapComplete?
Do you have any design references?
Which would be the competitors? or that you are inspired by?
you can answer me through OSM anyway
Comment from nukeador on 9 November 2021 at 14:20
Thanks for sharing this idea, I fully agree that contributor experience should improve and adapt to modern times and dynamics, that something I’m thinking a lot in my daily job as HOT Community Strategist.
There are clearly a few problems we can describe about the current contributor experience and some assumptions on how to improve them. In addition to that there are also few resources to test these assumptions, but I’m confident there will be opportunities to support the people who are interested in this space.
Gustavo, let me know if you want to talk about this more over a coffee-chat or email, more than happy to learn more about your ideas!
Cheers.
Comment from arukuni on 24 November 2021 at 06:57
This is an awesome idea, it would definitely get people to be more interested in OSM. I’m not really sure what steps should we take to implement that.
Comment from SomeoneElse on 6 November 2022 at 22:33
(commenting here because this seems a more appropriate place https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/3785 )
This, and https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/3785, seem to be:
Normally, the way that development around OSM happens is that someone implements a small part of what they are suggesting, sometimes independently to the main site. That is then discussed with the people who look after the main site, because obviously there are lots of issues that they are aware of that “normal” people may not be (how it is integrated with the management software used, for example; legal issues such as GDPR, etc.). That discussion often takes the place of actual suggested code changes on github.
How close are you to actually being able to contribute code - either as a working proof of concept project external to osm.org, or as suggested changes to the main website itself?
Unfortunately, just providing pictures of what something might look like without any idea of how it could be implemented (or even if it is at all feasible) does not get us any closer to seeing your vision realised, but an implementation of something would.
Do you have any actual development experience? I’m guessing based on github possibly not, and if that’s the case I’d suggest that in the short term you concentrate on how to deliver a small part of your vision yourself. You’ll no doubt need to learn some new tools and solve some problems on the way, but that’ll help you answer the questions that people are bound to ask (e.g. “how would you avoid X being a problem”).
Comment from MatthiasMatthias on 7 November 2022 at 19:33
My two cents to SomeoneElse: I think all inspiration is great and would absolutely not discourage people to make proposals. There are many people with programming skills that lack in design (me, for example). Everybody should provide what she or he is most skilled in to achieve the best result. Definitely it is not a good idea to make all contributors learn coding, that will be a waste of energy and probably not get best results. It’s true, that in the end someone needs to code it - but the first step is always a discussion.
Comment from SomeoneElse on 7 November 2022 at 21:24
@MatthiasMatthias In what I wrote above I tried to suggest a way forward so that the diarist here can see the ideas described here realised.
OSM does not have dozens of people with no ideas but lots of free time just waiting for people with ideas to come forward that they can implement. It actually has the reverse - lots of people with ideas about how things should work, but reletively few people in a position to implement them. To say otherwise is actually grossly unfair on people writing diary entries such as this - it encourages them to think that “software is written in powerpoint”**. In practice software (of any sort) gets written because someone somewhere wants to do it or because someone is paying them to do it - but the person doing the writing has to know how to write software.
The good news is that with OSM everything you need to know is out in the open - for almost all OSM software the source is available and there are plenty of places where people who want to learn how to implement something can ask and get help about how to do it.
** I actually once did work for someone who seemed to think that - he once claimed that he had “demoed XYZ feature to a customer” when what he actually meant was created some slides of what it might look like.
Comment from nukeador on 8 November 2022 at 12:55
Hi all,
Can I suggest to frame this conversation more widely? (both in audience and scope).
I would suggest to open a new topic over the OSM Community Forums to reach out to more people:
https://community.openstreetmap.org/c/general/38
The framing for this topic might be better around the problem space first, to get overall alignment on what problems, issues or improvements the OSM site has today for contributors and users. With the right framing, discussion overseeing and time boundaries, this will avoid the never ending discussion around specific solutions.
Once the scope of the problem space is well defined, maybe there is a need for a working group to handle that, understanding how many people with UX, design and coding expertise are needed and what are the priority buckets.
If there is not enough people with free time to commit, maybe asking OSMF or others to finance the work of this WG would be a good idea.
My 2 cents here :-)
Cheers.
Comment from PlayzinhoAgro on 12 November 2022 at 19:17
@SomeoneElse Not because it’s just an image that does not have its importance, I have free time and knowledge of Design and this was the best way to contribute.
@nukeador thanks for the tip I will open a topic on the forum by the end of the year.